NEW LIGHT FOR NEW PHYSICS: LAYING THE FIRST STONE OF HILUMI LHC AT CERN

It is a priority of the European strategy in particle physics and it’s going to be the biggest physics project of the next 10 years. It’s High Luminosity LHC, aka HiLumi LHC, which today, 15 June, at CERN is celebrating the laying of its first stone, with the start of the civil engineering work. The HiLumi LHC project, in which Italy is in the front line with the INFN, will boost CERN’s superaccelerator to increase its luminosity, one of the main indicators of performance of a particle accelerator, in other words the number of potential collisions per unit of surface in a given time interval. The large detectors positioned along the LHC 27 km superconductor ring at the collision points of the particle beams also have to be uprated, in view of the machine’s new performance. The LHC HiLumi project will make a contribution to explaining the properties of the Higgs boson more accurately and will thus describe in greater detail how it is produced, decays and interacts with other particles. Besides that, scenarios beyond the Standard Model will be put to the test, for example, supersymmetry (SUSY), the theories with extra dimensions, the structure of quarks and much more. The LHC HiLumi project is the fruit of a major international undertaking, involving 29 Institutes from 13 Countries.